


like vines we intertwine

by ang3lba3



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Humanstuck, See End Notes for Trigger Warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-02
Updated: 2017-03-02
Packaged: 2018-09-27 19:37:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10042955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ang3lba3/pseuds/ang3lba3
Summary: Vriska and Terezi's lives intertwine like vines, although whether the ivy is poison or not is up for debate.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This story would never have existed without my friend Blaze. I don't know if you'll like how it ends, or if you'll like it at all, but I hope you know that I've loved and hated and despaired making this story in equal measures. But mostly loved. And hated. And DESPAIRED. <3<
> 
> The title is from the song "we, intertwined", because I had to name it fucking something and that's been stuck in my head all day.
> 
> See end notes for a list of (spoilery) trigger warnings

“We’ve been here _forever,”_ Karkat whines, back and head hanging off the pirate ship, legs the only thing between him and a cracked skull.

“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to kick you in the knees until you fall in the woodchips big mouth first,” Vriska threatens, setting her hands on her hips. The plastic handle of her foam pirate sword clinks against her belt. “You’re being a worse first mate than usual, and that’s saying something.”

“I never wanted to be a pirate,” Karkat grumbles, but he does it as quietly as he knows how, so Vriska is still undecided about punishing him when he says louder, “When is Terezi going to get here? She's so much more fun to play with.”

“Keep your gross crush to yourself,” Vriska snaps. _“I’m_ the one who’s going to marry her. _You’re_ just the one marrying us.”

Karkat makes a noise of disgust so loudly that parents on the playground actually glance up to see when a beached whale appeared and whether they can film it rather than their children. Upon finding it was only a Vantas, all of which are semi-infamous for their lung capacity and activist preacher patriarch, they look away. He deigns to drag himself up so he’s facing her.

“I’m going to marry Dave, so you can shove it up your pee hole!” his face is all scrunched up in that stupid way it gets when he’s upset—it never fails to make Vriska want to punch him until his teeth fall out. A few are loose in front! It wouldn’t even be that hard!

Before she can knock anyone’s teeth out—and she’d do it with the handle of her sword, and it would be _fantastic_ , and he’d bleed _everywhere—_ there’s a squeaky roar from behind her.

Vriska spins to face the intruder who has landed on her ship, brandishing her sword grandly.

“Who dares take port on Captain Mindfang’s ship!” she demands.

“The mightiest of Pros’cuting Attorney Dragons, Her Horrible Tyranny, Redglare Terrrrrezi Pyrrrrrope!” the mightiest of Pros’cuting Attorney Dragons, Her Horrible Tyranny, Redglare Terrrrrezi Pyrrrrrope says. She rolls her r’s with a surprising precision for a seven year old.

(Vriska spent an entire month trying to learn how to do it, and Terezi figured it out in the first half hour.

She still has not been forgiven.)

“What business have you here?” Captain Mindfang asks. “And don’t try and pull a fast one, or I’ll cleave ye to the brisket, savvy?!”

“I am here because I need to be rescued!” Redglare says. Her name seems to have gotten a lot shorter since the last time she spoke, and her face is far too fierce for the statement she makes.

“Well, shiver me timbers, but rescuing Prosecuting Attorney Dragons is exactly my specialty.” Mindfang sheathes her sword just as dramatically as it had been drawn and swaggers toward the other girl. Everything is going according to script. “What ails ye? I shall give no quarter to that which harms you, my fair dragon.”

“I’m cursed to be married to an ugly prince named Dave because of compulsorority hetorosexuallity,” she says. (She’d learned the words from Kanaya’s older sister and immediately taken a liking to them.) Redglare points behind herself, and a white blond head appears over the side of the ship, and then a young boy drags the rest of himself up.

“I’m not going to play this game if you’re just going to be a dillweed, ‘rezi,” he says, waving at Karkat. Karkat hastily pulls himself fully to his feet and does his best to nonchalantly wave back.

Not for the first time, Vriska realizes how disgusting boys are.

“Fine, I’m betrothed to Prince Not Entirely Disgusting Dave Strider,” Terezi says, rolling her blue green eyes.

“There’s only one solution,” Vriska says, face grim, doing her best not to lose her temper and only accomplishing it because just this _once_ they were going to get through the goddamn script without having to stop for her to correct one of the others. Just _once._ “We have to get married. That scallywag’s pimple and booger covered hands will never touch you again, my fair dragon.”

“Really?” Dave says with distinct displeasure. Vriska gloats at his reaction.

“DAVE’S HANDS ARE PERFECT,” Karkat shouts.

Captain Mindfang and her Horrible Tyranny roll their eyes in tandem.

Terezi holds out her hand to Vriska, and the pirate captain catches it up, pressing a gallant kiss to it with a bow that sweeps back a cape she’s not wearing.

“First mate Whiney Big Mouth!” Vriska breaks the moment to call, pointing at Karkat. “Marry us immediately!”

Karkat makes a weird face, having been caught just about to yell at her with the news that he got to marry someone. He wants to be a priest like his dad was so he can marry people all the time, and is a staunch ignorer of anyone who points out that he can’t marry Dave then.

“Dearly beloved,” he starts, moving to stand in front of his Captain and her dragon. “We are gathered here today because of _love._ Love is—“

Then comes the boring part of the game, where Karkat gets to drone as long as he wants about love. It ends, as always, with Vriska threatening to push him off the ship if he doesn’t wrap it up soon.

“Do you accept Terezi to be your lawfully wedded dragon wife?” Karkat asks through gritted teeth.

“I do,” Vriska says, filling with the same obnoxiously giddy joy she always is at saying those words. _I do means mine, and mine means no one else’s._

“And do you accept Vriska to—“ Karkat starts, but Terezi is already dipping Vriska in her arms to place a smacking smooch on her lips.

“I do!” she crows.

“YOU DIDN’T LET ME FINISH!” Karkat yells in frustration. “I WASH MY HANDS OF THIS STUPID POOPY UGLY BUTT PIMPLE FART WEDDING.”

“Dude, chill,” Dave says, pressing a hand to Karkat’s shoulder.

“I WILL NOT CHILL. I HAVE NEVER CHILLED, AND I NEVER WILL CHILL, AND I HATE THAT YOU THINK I COULD.”

He goes on like that for quite some time, by the end of which Vriska and Terezi have been playing house with the Lalondes for a solid ten minutes.

 

~*~

 

Vriska wakes up to the smell of burning eggs, and a discordant shrieking.

It’s not the slow, glorious awakening that she thinks befits a twenty three year old breadwinner of the household living alone with her fiancé. Such a morning should be greeted with a head between her legs, a quiet kiss on the back of her neck, perhaps the sound of crackling bacon. And _not_ before 10 AM.

“LIVE FAST DIE YOUNG BAD GIRLS DO IT WELL!”

The clock says 6:49 AM.

“THE CHAIN HITS MY CHEST WHEN I’M SUBBIN’ WITH MY GIRLFRIEND!”

Those aren’t even the lyrics.

“THE RAIN HITS THE DECK WHEN I’M WAITING ON A PIZZA!”

Christ, just one goddamn day, that’s all she asks.

Vriska drags herself out of the bed, making a mistake and tangling a foot in her blankets. It leaves her face down on the wood and groaning her misfortune.

“Are you okay in there?” calls Terezi over the music, blissfully cutting off the squawk of her singing voice.

“’m fine!” she calls back, because otherwise Terezi will come in and laugh at her and it’s too early for that to _not_ lead to violence.

She eventually makes her grumbling way off the floor and into the kitchen, pressing on even when she walks into two separate door jambs and a coffee table. When she finally flops down at the kitchen table, Terezi is snickering to herself much less discreetly than she thinks. Or maybe exactly as discreetly as she thinks.

Vriska does a breathing exercise, says, “Is this _funny_ to you?”

“Noooo,” Terezi says, full on cackling. Vriska picks up the Alphys pepper shaker and chucks it at her back—not as hard as she might have, she would like it noted. It bounces off Terezi’s sharp shoulder blade with an arcing spray of white over the blue tile as it comes down onto the floor before miraculously not shattering.

Terezi spins around in full indignation, forgetting that the egg she was cooking was _on top_ of the spatula when she decided to do that. It flops directly on top of Alphys. Both Undyne the pepper shaker and Vriska grin victoriously from the table at Terezi.

“Rude! I, who woke up so early to provide my arachnid lover with indispensable sustenance for the great battles ahead—“

“It’s Saturday! What are you even _talking_ about?”

“It’s _Sunday,_ and that means… roleplaying!”

Suddenly, the early hour makes a lot more sense. They have to play early, if they want to be able to include the multiple time zones that everyone is in. Jade is especially hard to work in, since most of the party refuses to play without her, and she keeps an up with the sun and lying with dogs schedule.

By which Vriska means, of course, that her dog decides when she goes to bed. This makes perfect sense, and she does not want to speak on either Jade or Bec any further.

“If I kill myself now, will you defile my corpse by using me like one of Strider’s puppets so you can live out this sick little fantasy where I run this game at seven in the morning on my _day off?_ ”

“You love it, and you know it. Last week you got to see Rose beat Dave over the head with his own bondage gear.”

Vriska’s lips thin out as she tries to suppress a pout. Terezi is right, but admitting it would literally kill her. She’s made a suicide pact with her ego, and damn if she won’t keep it.

There’s a loud clatter from outside the window over the sink, and both of their heads snap towards it. The necessary neighborhood douchebag is sat on his ass, having tripped over his own designer shoelaces in his apparent attempt to sneak up to the window and watch them through it.

“Get the fuck off of my property before I throw your corpse off of it Ampora!” Vriska hollers, and Terezi groans loudly and slams the curtains shut.

“I’m gonna go brush my teeth,” Vriska mutters, shaking with pent up frustration and needing a moment to herself. Terezi doesn’t say anything, just cracks another two eggs into the pan.

 

She found her suggestion of dressing up as Spiderwoman and Daredevil to kick his ass to be perfectly reasonable, but Terezi had laughed in that certain way and Vriska had learned not to push a suggestion after that. It was an infuriating sort of laugh, an, _I’m going to pretend that was a joke and you’re going to let me if you don’t want to have a problem_.

The bathroom is as cozy as always, a nice word for cramped. There’s barely enough room for the one person shower, standing sink, and toilet. The back of Vriska’s ankles brush the glass of the shower door when she takes a step back to spit properly in the small bowl.

She’s halfway finished adjusting pulling on a pair of jeans when she hears the crash of a plate hitting the floor and shattering. It’s not such an unusual sound, so she just sighs and ignores it.  The thump that follows, however, is the kind that accompanies a body hitting the floor rather than a piece of ceramic. Vriska hops fully into the jeans, heart starting to race with a weird sort of dread. She buttons as she speed walks into the kitchen.

“Are you o—“ she cuts herself off, when she sees Terezi curled sideways in an awkward crumble on the floor. Her bottle red hair is a vivid splash on the white and black diamond tiles, and her usually flushed face has gone deathly pale. She’s narrowly missed faceplanting into the broken plant, and there’s charred egg from the broken plate all over her.

“Terezi?” Vriska asks, heart twitching up from her chest to her throat.  She drops to her knees in front of her fiancé, drags her away from the eggs just far enough that she can shake her awake.

Terezi’s mouth lolls open a little at the force, but she stays unconscious.

“Fuck, fuck,” Vriska whispers, letting Terezi slump into just one of her arms so she can slap her. A red mark blooms across Terezi’s face, vibrant and already preparing to bruise.

She does not wake.

Vriska sets Terezi down not as carefully as she should have, and looks around desperately for a phone. She spots one on the counter, and after several frustrating seconds of attempting to unlock it realizes that it wants Terezi’s fingerprint. She gives a little screech to try and vent enough to not throw the goddamn thing, and as she drops to her knees to get Terezi’s limp fingers against the screen she opens the emergency dial pad by accident. Why the _fuck_ did she not think of that?

 _Because you're panicking like a useless shit,_ her brain whispers in a voice that sounds a lot like her mom's.

“I’m trying!” she yells, just as the 911 operator speaks.

 

 

She’s thirteen years old now, and the pirate ship seems small now. With her back flat on the deck, her feet hang off the edge and her loose shoelaces graze against the ground. Every piece of her is acutely aware of its location relative to Terezi’s position mirroring her own; the way their knees just barely graze each other (Rezi’s so sharp she’s surprised it doesn’t cut slits in her jeans, Vriska’s rounded and thick), Terezi’s bony pinky around Vriska’s chubby one, their hair spread in black and blonde halos that mix on the brown plastic of the ship’s planks.

“Do you ever think about when we were kids?” Vriska asks, not exactly sure where she’s going with this, but the feeling in her gut assuring her it’s the right thing.

“What do you mean?” Terezi asks, turning her head to face away from the sunset and to Vriska.

Vriska doesn’t turn her head as well, doesn’t know if she could handle being that close while her guts pour out her mouth.

“I mean, like, when we’d play Princess Dragon and Pirates.”

There’s a strange kind of sanctity to the moment, as the world settles into the unsure place between night and day. It reminds her of a sleepover, of staying up far too late and whispering things that could never be said when the sun is out.

_(My mom hurts me when I do something wrong. My mom doesn’t leave food in the fridge. My mom brings home strange men and strange women and some of them—)_

**(My mom is never home. We’ve had to move twice because of gangs coming after us. Sometimes they get inside before the police do and-)**

“Oh!” Terezi says, sounding somewhat surprised and all quizzical. She hums thoughtfully. “Not really. Why?”

“I do. I—I think about it all the time. Karkat would marry us, remember? He’d quote sections of Princess Bride or Cinderella or Love Actually or whatever and then, uh—“ she pauses, unwilling or unable to force the next bit out.

 _Get your shit together, Serket,_ she scolds herself. It isn’t becoming.

“Then we’d kiss?” Terezi asks. Vriska can feel her breath against her ear, like she’d moved closer.

Fuck, she wasn’t about to be outmatched by Pyrope, and as much as her stomach is turning, she likes the direction this was going. She turns her head too. Terezi’s wearing a small, nervous smirk, and a flush to her cheeks that makes her hazel eyes a strangely bright teal in the misdirection of the dying light of the sun.

“Yeah,” Vriska whispers. She nudges her head forward a little, stopping when their noses touch. She closes her eyes, because they’re crossing trying to focus. “Kinda like. . .”

“This,” Terezi says, and closes the gap between their mouths with an inexperienced push.

They don’t do much, both frozen, both lit up from the inside with a strange fire that starts at their lips and leaves their bodies quivery and sparking. Vriska’s body is pulsing with bright lights, sharp sunlit veins and every hair standing at attention in the shivery goodness of it. Her mouth falls open slightly, and Terezi giggles a little, pulling back.

All three of Vriska’s feelings are offended and annoyed that they’re not kissing anymore.

“Hey!” she rebukes.

“No, no—“ Terezi says, reaching out a hand and curling it into Vriska’s hair down by the roots, a little tug that makes Vriska’s breath go quick for a moment. Terezi’s eyes are dancing, lips quirked in that particular way no one else could replicate. “—you’re fine, you’re perfect, it’s just. This sounds stupid.”

She pulls Vriska forward, presses their mouths together again. Vriska feels more teeth than lips, even as Terezi speaks against her.

“I’m just happy.”

 

 

“Why can’t I sit in back?” Vriska’s voice is shrill, borderline painful in the way it pierces the air. It sounds hysterical, on edge, a thread ready to snap.

“We need the room to work,” the EMT says, ushering Vriska towards the passenger side door. She backs up as he pulls closer, shoulders tensing defensively. He’s far more calm than is appropriate.

It takes a second to force herself to remember that now isn’t the time to deck someone, it’s time to take Terezi to the hospital. She makes a guttural noise in response to his platitudes, and drags herself up with some difficulty into the tall ambulance seat. She twists around to watch the back immediately, fumbling the seatbelt on by touch alone.

Understanding what they’re doing to Terezi isn’t happening, mostly because she can’t tear her eyes away from her wan face and the spread of purple blue on waxen cheekbone. Her red hair looks aggressively artificial, so much like blood, flattening back from her face awkwardly against the gurney in a thick puddle.

The ride goes by in a blink, an eternity, Vriska counting seconds in her head and never being able to keep track over thirty. She mentally makes a note to tell her anger management counselor that counting is bullshit in a crisis.

She stumbles out of the ambulance the second the car is mostly stopped, just barely keeping from slamming knees and hands down into the concrete. It’s a rush then, following the gurney, answering questions in a daze and patting herself down for a wallet that is miraculously on her person. More quickly than Vriska can follow, Terezi is being rolled off to MRI’s or X-rays or whatever radioactive shit they’re gonna microwave her skull in to make sure she isn’t hemorrhaging internally.

It leaves Vriska in a plastic chair in a room defined by curtains instead of  walls. She tries tilting her head back to feel less like throwing up, but is almost immediately overwhelmed by the stark expanse the ceiling. The noises of the rooms surrounding her—throwing up, crying, moaning, a bark of incongruous laughter—beat into her ears and her body like physical forces.

She tries to breathe.

She doesn’t know if she succeeds.

 

 

Terezi sways towards her, sharp angles and a sharper smile, obviously not wearing a bra under the slinky teal and red prom dress. Vriska tries not to grin like a moron, but Terezi sees it anyways and kisses the corner of her mouth that refuses to twitch down into a neutral expression.

“Is that a drunk smile or are you just happy to see me?” Terezi asks, pressing another cup of punch into Vriska’s hand.

“Mmm,” Vriska says, a little huskier than she’d meant to, because she wants to drop down to her knees and make it clear to god and everyone who Terezi belongs to. “Drunk.”

She downs the plastic cup like a shot, because at this point it has so much alcohol it might as well be straight up liquor. Vriska knows for sure at least four people spiked it, two of them being the hottest lesbian couple in the school. Or the country. Quite possibly the universe, unless out there existed two even hotter alien versions of them.

“Liar,” Terezi says with a grin, and takes the wax covered paper cup from Vriska, crumpling it in her fist and dropping it on the floor. “Wanna dance?”

Vriska allows herself the smile this time, grabs Terezi by the waist and drags her towards the part of the gymnasium dedicated to gyrating.

 

 

Terezi is wheeled back in, eyes open and dull. Vriska could cry with relief, but when she opens her mouth to say _you scared me,_ or, _are you okay,_ she can’t quite get it out.

Instead the silence crushes them, and the noises that had bombarded her earlier seem muffled and so distant as to not matter in the heavy air of the room. The curtains that serve as walls feel a mile thick, and the nurse settling Terezi in with blankets and instructions can’t break the stillness of the moment.

When the nurse leaves, Vriska moves forward through syrupy empty space to scooch her chair up to Terezi’s bedside. Terezi doesn’t say anything, or turn her head, but her fingers close vise like over her fiance’s. The world screams quietly around them, and very far away.

The doctor, when he appears, is grim faced in a way that tells them nothing.

When she does tell them, Vriska wishes she had stayed stone faced and silent.

 

 

“Senior prom sucked ass,” Vriska announces. She flops back onto the hotel bed loudly, partially for Terezi’s benefit. She’d lost a bet that left her blindfolded with her red scarf.

She did _not_ make a graceful sightless woman, but she refused to take it off.

“Sucking ass is too pure and good a thing to describe that,” Terezi says, stumbling towards the bed.

Vriska reaches for the remote, presses the _on_ button for some background noise. They have this shit down to a science—perfected over years of unsupervised sleepovers, semi-supervised sleepovers, and very closely supervised sleepovers. Terezi hits the bed on the side opposite Vriska, and seems disappointed that she didn’t land with her spindly elbow in Vriska’s stomach. She immediately remedies this error by elbowing and kneeing her way onto Vriska’s lap.

“That’s _it_ , I’m calling veto power on the blindfold,” Vriska snaps, tugging it over Terezi’s head without bothering to tie it. Some hair was caught in the tie of it, and it rips out with a yelp from Terezi.

It leaves her blinking in the sudden light, hair bunched strangely, frizzy with the disruption to it laying flat.

She can’t stay annoyed at the dopey, endearing expression on Terezi’s face, however. It was Gamzee’s fault that she was wearing it anyways, and she could always get her revenge on him in much better ways that disrupted her life plans less than being angry with Terezi.

Terezi cackles at whatever she must see in Vriska when her eyes finally adjust.

“What?!” Vriska says defensively, pushing at Terezi until she’s on her back and Vriska is over _her_. Her short blue skirt bunches easily around her hips, leaving her free to straddle Terezi’s waist. It’s such a small thing, this symbolic dominance, but it’s important to her.

Especially when Terezi is laughing in her face.

“You _like-_ like me,” Terezi says with a malicious kind of glee completely unnecessary for the topic.

Vriska rolls her eyes and throws her head back with a groan. The action had been anticipated for the night, the cause less so. Although, experience should have taught her other expectations.

 _Yo, ho, ho,_ sings the TV in the background, _all hands, hoist the colors high. . ._

“OHMYGOD,” Vriska says, going from zero to a hundred at an alarming speed. She flips off Terezi in an acrobatic move she never would have accomplished if she’d been thinking about the way her body was twisting. As it was, her back and neck cracked simultaneously.

“We were gonna do the secks,” Terezi muttered in soft protest, adjusting the way she was laying and knocking into the discarded TV remote. The TV Guide pops up at the bottom of the screen, and Terezi shrieks. “Hiram McDaniel’s intro episode for Welcome to Night Vale! Look! Look!”

Vriska snatches the remote from underneath Terezi’s hip and switches off the TV Guide, crying out when Terezi pounces to take it back.

 

 

Terezi’s starting to cry. Not loudly, but persistently, small hiccups like she can’t get enough air, repressed weeping in every restrained sob.

Doctor Scratch is discussing their. . . options.

The world is too big and it echoes around Vriska with a sense of dissonance that’s nauseating and makes it far too hard to focus. The problem is, she can’t make it work in her head. It just doesn’t make _sense._

Normally she’d scream, throw something, punch the doctor’s face in until he stopped saying such fucked up things, but she can’t move. Her limbs are trapped in amber, and the world comes in flashes around her.

Counseling—recommendation to a specialist—no it wasn’t just a smudge on the screen—exit paperwork—don’t forget to call the insurance company—

 

 

They fall asleep curled together, Terezi’s head leaning into Vriska’s shoulder at an angle that will hurt both of their necks. Vriska is propped up against the shitty headboard in a reclining position with far too few pillows, and the morning will come with indents in her back and severe regret.

 

 

The roads are as quiet as they ever are in Prospit, which is to say: not very. Driving takes most of Vriska’s concentration, and the rest goes to shivering from the cold. Terezi’s rolled the window all the way down, hand dragging through the breeze, face tilted into the night. It’s October, and way too fucking cold for that, but Vriska doesn’t say anything.

(She doesn’t know if she can speak anymore.)

Their house looks foreboding instead of welcoming, because if they take it home it will be Real. Vriska wants nothing more than to drop into bed, and she considers suggesting they rent a motel room for the night.

(She doesn’t want it to be real, she doesn’t want it so bad she’s choking on it.)

The front door is unlocked, not that it matters since it’s also partially open. Vriska is too tired to check for robbers, but she still goes through the door first.

(It would feel real fucking good to beat the shit out of a trespasser right now.)

They end up standing in the kitchen together, having passed through the hallway and living room with no pauses, but. . .

(The walls are the color of sunshine, but they look like pus in the darkness and the context.)

There’s a shattered plate on the floor, little pieces of blue ceramic mixed with scrambled eggs and observed carefully by a fly. Something cracks a little in Vriska’s chest at that, seeing the eggs from a morning a year and a day away. She lets out a little huff of breath, a stressed sob that doesn’t quite fully form in her lungs. It catches in her throat instead, turns into some sound she’s never heard or made before.

It breaks the stillness between them, and Terezi slumps into Vriska’s side. Her face buries itself in the bend of Vriska’s neck, shades digging into the skin of her throat and collarbone. It’s spots of pain-pressure-sharp that cuts into her and leaves her breathing raggedly as her hands start to shake.

She could really use that robber right about now.

 

 

“You can’t—for fuck’s sake, Terezi, you’re nineteen years old!” Vriska half yells. “This isn’t funny so I don’t know why you’re—“

“You think I would joke about this?” Terezi hisses, voice blunt enough to crack glass and jagged enough that the glass could already be broken. The shades she stole from Strider, ever present with the past week’s increased light sensitivity, slip down when she lurches forward violently. Her fist is raised like she’s going to use it, but she winces with a cry and shoves them back up, rocking back away from Vriska.

“I don’t.” Vriska is hesitant. What Terezi is saying can’t be remotely possible, but Terezi hasn’t hit her out of anger since they were eleven years old and she found out Vriska was bullying the Nitram boys.

(Vriska withheld that she was just trying to make the pathetic worm stronger, and Terezi withheld that shoving him off the playset and breaking his legs so badly he would never be able to walk without crutches again was not the way to make _anyone_ stronger.)

“You really have cancer?” she asks, voice small, hopeful in a way that’s so weak sounding she wants to push _herself_ off a playset. She suddenly wishes that she’d let Terezi hurt her—it would have made her angry, and that sounds better than whatever she’ll feel when Terezi answers.

But Terezi doesn’t answer, just steps through the front entrance of Vriska’s house, heads to the cramped loveseat, and puts on Dragon Tales. Vriska sits down beside her, and threads their fingers together, wondering why if she didn’t _want_ to hear the answer, she feels so bereft without it.

 

 

It should have been harder to pretend everything is normal.

Then again, it’s not hard to pretend, when you aren’t concerned about pretending well.

Time passes, because it always does, and they don’t talk about it, because theres nothing they can say that would change it. The silence is oppressive, and Terezi handles Vriska like spun glass, and Vriska doesn’t stop handling Terezi at all. Two days after—after—she goes down on Terezi, licks and kisses and sucks until Terezi shoves her away just to drag her to her mouth. Neither of them come, and Vriska’s spit tastes like a lot of wasted effort and another person’s morning breath when she brushes her teeth.

Terezi skips class every day that week, and Vriska doesn’t ask when or if she’s going back. Instead of criminology courses lectures, she listens to the home shopping channel, letting her fingers dance over the same lines in her braille copy of Eragon. Eventually she gives up all pretense of reading, gathers her scalemates in a fort on the couch that leaves no room for Vriska.

She sits on the recliner.

 

 

Life keeps happening. Bills need to be paid, more and more bills, and Terezi’s professors call and call, and friends try and make coffee dates that are not accepted due to “the flu”.

Vriska goes to work, and tries a little less than usual not to punch creeps that hit on her and don’t stop. She hasn’t smoked since that brief time she was in college, but the habit comes back with a vengeance because she craves to put anything between her fingers and in her mouth that will burn her up.

The tips don’t stop coming, even though the service is abysmal. There’s zero sharp edged flirting, winks or smiles or even that much cleavage. She has stains from her lunch on her tank top more often than not, smells somewhat like sweat and a lot like tears, and every dollar that goes into her pocket is pity fueled.

She’s never hated herself more.

It’s not that the job has ever been _great,_ per se. In fact, it’s never even been _good,_ if you’re going for morals. Cronus Ampora, local greaser and wannabe, clogs up the bar with his hair gel and date rape vibes. The Midnight Crew and the Felt clog it up with the scent of gunpowder and blood. The Jack cousins fill it up with violence and threats.

Vriska loves it, and Snowman makes her wet, so she sticks around in the vain hope that someday it will lead to something More.

Getting home is somehow more exhausting than the fourteen hour shifts she’s been picking up are. It’s nine in the morning and the sun is far too bright and her ears are still ringing with drinking songs. _Go to bed with the sun. . ._

 She doesn’t open the door to their house right away, just gently leans her forehead into the cracked blue wood and tries not to fall over. Going inside sounds awful, but the winter sun is reflecting off the snow straight into her goddamn eyes. Normally she loves the light—once stole a sun lamp when Terezi made her stop tanning—but it’s too early for this shit.

If she sneaks a smoke now, she’ll smell too strongly of it to blame on the bar, although she would anyways. It would probably lead to a fight, and Vriska seriously considers that for a long moment as she tries to figure out if that’s preferable to the chilling disconnect between them now. Worst that could happen is that Terezi would say nothing, and that Vriska would be watching her fiancé die just that littlest bit more.

There’s a flutter of red in her peripheral vision before she could decide, and she turns her head just enough to see that the kitchen window is pushed wide open, curtain blowing in and out with the wind.

She walks to the window with a sigh and goes to shut it before she realizes that she can’t hear the TV. It’s twenty degrees, but this is the first time she’s shivered, as she pushes the window back open and calls for Terezi.

No answer.

Her heart pounds in her throat, and she heads for the door, pressing it open without having to unlock it. That’s not unusual, exactly, since they barely bother to lock it during the day or when one of them is home.

It still makes her go cold in a distinctly unpleasant manner.

Vriska pulls out her phone and dials Terezi’s number, not able to cross the threshold and break through the membrane of fear that surrounds the empty and dead-silent apartment.

She can’t hear Terezi’s phone ringing, but she sees it on the table, watches it as it vibrates across until it falls down onto the floor.

F-u-c-k.

Feet deadened with shock take her to the bedroom after a quick scan makes it clear that Terezi isn’t anywhere in the living room or kitchen.

She’s not there.

Vriska tears the house apart, calls the police and gets blown off, emails Terezi’s professors and finds she hasn’t been there for a month.

Eventually, there’s nothing left for her to do but wait, to sit on the couch and hold Pyralsprite and all the memories that are wrapped into him. He was Terezi’s first scalemate, a gift from Aradia and Tavros, back when they were all more or less on good terms.

But that had been a long time ago.

 

 

“So we’re—“ Vriska laughs, a nervous tinkle that doesn’t suit her or the image she’s so carefully cultivated. Terezi’s answering smirk is a little less confident than it usually is. “—we’re really doing this, aren’t we?”

“I mean, unless you can think of something better to do.” Terezi flops onto her bed dramatically, arching in a stretch that leaves her ribs straining at her skin and shirt rucked up in a way that makes Vriska’s mouth water.

Shit, they’re really doing this.

She tries not to let her nerves get the best of her, because _nothing_ gets the best of her, not Vriska fucking Serket. Nothing would dare to. Sex? That’s _nothing._

Stripping off her shirt is easy, and she doesn’t bother to do it sexy when she can just do it with false confidence—no, real confidence, everything about this is painfully _real—_ and throws it across the room and not even close to the hamper. In a way that she’d definitely meant to do.

Terezi licks her lips, the first sign of nerves, but more likely anticipation. Because there’s nothing to be nervous _about._ They know each other every single other way that people could know each other. What’s gonna change if they touch each other’s vaginas?

Long fingers tug Vriska on top of Terezi’s lap when she gets near, and Vriska goes there gratefully. She can feel her pulse in between her legs, a solid pull that makes it hard to focus on anything else. Her skirt settles nicely around their legs, pulling up as she sits down onto Terezi’s lap. The button of Terezi’s jeans dig into a very nice place, and her breath catches.

Her panties are cute today, which means that she had no idea anyone was going to see them so Toad is plastered across her snatch and she’s trying really, _really,_ hard to believe that’s sexy.

What’s legitimately sexy is the scratch of denim on her thighs, the way Terezi catches her fingertips just underneath the elastic waistband of her skirt, the way Terezi looks up at her with a challenging, considering glance before rolling her hips upwards.

Refusing to be outdone—and Vriska can see it in her girlfriend’s eyes, knows that’s what she’s thinking—she grinds back, and leans down to kiss Terezi. It’s messier than usual, as there are far more factors to consider, like how uncomfortable clothes are, and how very little she’s prepared for this moment, and how Terezi’s hand is tangling in her hair.

Terezi pulls back—rather, pulls Vriska’s head back by the hair and she makes a dumb noise that will be stricken from the record—and says, “okay, this angle ain’t doing shit for me. Let me just—“

At that, she attempts to sit up, instinctively expecting Vriska to move her head out of the way of her elbow flailing upwards (and why did her elbow need to go up in the first place?!), but completely discounting the fact that Vriska had Terezi’s hand keeping her head still.

“Motherfucker!” Vriska yelled as Terezi’s elbow hit her in the nose. “Pus bucket!”

“Oh my god,” Terezi says, taking her hand out of Vriska’s hair not as carefully as she should have. Vriska yells again, and when she takes her hand away from the deep ache in her face it’s red and dripping.

“What did you do!” she says, shoving the hand so close to Terezi’s face it’s got to be impossible for her to focus her eyes.

“Uh, failed the hands on sex ed unit, probably,” Terezi answered.

Vriska snorted with laughter despite herself, and made an incoherent little noise when it burbled blood down into her mouth.

 

 

“Where the fuck have you been?” Vriska asks, and is relieved at the familiarity of righteous rage in place of the nauseating concern she’d been suffering with for the past hour and a half.

Terezi is frozen in the doorway, guilty, right hand holding her keys and left hand holding her “I’m a Grandma. What’s _your_ superpower?” tote bag.

“Doctors,” she says, blasé, and oh, so she was going to pretend she’d done nothing _wrong, were they?_

“And it didn’t occur to you to take your phone? Or leave a note?”

“You weren’t supposed to be home for another hour,” Terezi says, gracefully side stepping the topic as well as the scalemate that Vriska had hurled at the door somewhere around the forty five minute mark.

“Fuck that!” Vriska yells, and it feels so _good_ to yell. “You should have told me where you went!”

“What are you, my owner?” Terezi snaps back. “I thought we were past you trying to control what I did. Maybe we should just call Aranea and schedule an emergency session.”

Vriska gave a frustrated little hiss through her teeth. “I thought we were past you not claiming responsibility for your ac—“

“Oh, _projecting_ much? I was never the one with that particular problem babe.” Terezi is flushing now, and turns just enough to slam the door.

This is the most they’ve talked at once since they were at the E.R. It thrums in Vriska’s veins, invigorates her, _justifies_ her.

“Right, I forgot. Terezi, the poor victim, always blameless. I’m always somehow puppeting your actions, manipulating you.”

“Yes! Because you’re fucking manipulative! You’re _literally_ a psychopath, with a clinical diagnosis and court mandated therapy twice a month.”

“What’s wrong with that? You being fucking ableist now too? Speaking of therapy, maybe you should go to some so that you can drink a faygo without having a panic attack.”

Vriska didn’t notice they were gravitating closer as they fought, but she does when Terezi takes three steps forward.

“Bring him up again like that and this is _over,”_ Terezi says, voice quiet, dangerous.

“Might as well stick with it, it’s only gonna last for a few months anyways.”

And then, because she knows how to win a fight and she’s always been somewhat of an angry crier, her face screws up and she lets herself sob a little bit.

Terezi’s bared teeth cover with a thin lipped grimace as she looks away, bringing the bag up to her chest like a shield. Vriska does a mental victory dance, starting to cry in earnest.

“I went to get the pain med scrip filled,” she says, a concession, an apology. “I thought I would be home sooner, but they needed a pre-auth and then there was bullshit because it’s a controlled substance. . . I left my phone here by accident and you were going to be at work late. It just. Made sense.”

She shrugs, baggy red fabric of her hoodie briefly revealing the definition of her shoulder.

Vriska takes a deep breath, then another. It feels good to cry, better to win, but she doesn’t need to be Ms Waterworks anymore.

“You can’t disappear like that,” she says firmly, in a tone that brooks no argument, if only from basic human empathy—it wavers in dramatic, uncontrollable surges, hitches at inconvenient places.

She might be a psychopath and these tears might be fake, but for a moment there she was beyond fucking scared that Terezi had died and she was alone.

“I’m sorry,” Terezi says after a long pause in which she seems to decide that Vriska deserves it, even if she did bring up Gamzee.

“I’m sorry too,” Vriska says, not really meaning it, but knowing from intimate experience how important it is to other people to hear those words from her.

“Okay,” Terezi says with a sigh, reaching out and touching Vriska’s cheek—just a little bit too high, but Vriska leans into the touch and ignores the way her fingernails scrape at her under eyes.

“Bob’s Burgers?” Vriska asks.

“Okay,” Terezi says, leaning in for a quick kiss that turns longer that turns too sad to continue.

 

 

“You shouldn’t have your eyes open,” Vriska says, voice hushed, holding Terezi’s hand and waiting for the anesthesia to take hold.

“You shouldn’t have a face so dumb I want it to be the last thing I see so I can forever marvel at how the universe creates such diversity,” Terezi says, valiantly fighting both sleep and pain bleary eyes.

Vriska kisses the back of her hand. Latula could have been in here, maybe should have, but only one person is allowed to sit in with her. Terezi got that look on her face that said she was about to make life hell for whoever was standing in her way, and Vriska went in with her (like there was ever any doubt she would). Terezi didn’t see the relieved look in her mother’s eyes, how Latula left the waiting room as soon as Terezi’s back was turned, grabbing her briefcase and buttoning up her blazer.

The law waited for no woman, after all, even if that woman’s daughter was getting cancerous eyes scooped out of her skull.

“Vriska,” Terezi said hesitantly. It had the air of confession to it, of importance, solemnity. It sounded like last night when she whispered, _I want you to be the last thing I see._ “’m scared.”

“It’s going to be okay,” Vriska offered, because it was or she was going to scoop the eyes out of some surgeons’ skulls.

Terezi closed her eyes, finally beginning to succumb. “Nah, it’s really. . .”

 

 

Vriska feels this is probably the point where they should start to tell friends and family, if that point hadn’t been passed a month ago. But she doesn’t want them there. She doesn’t want them monopolizing Terezi’s attention like they have a right to what little of it is left. She’ll have to deal with some unpleasantness—after, but that was unavoidable. Without Terezi, was there really any point in keeping contact with them anyways?

Terezi doesn’t want them there either, for her own set of selfish reasons, and Vriska uses every single one of them to justify her own behavior.

Even with the opiates in her system, Terezi screams sometimes, teeth biting viciously into Lemonsnout, and it makes Vriska feel so powerless she doesn’t know what to do. The nurse will be coming tomorrow to help set up hospice care, but until then they’re out of pain meds.

Vriska sits by Terezi, smoothing back her hair the way she’s seen in movies, flinching back with annoyance when Terezi pushes her hand away.

“Hurts,” she explains in a small voice, and Vriska holds back the urge to sigh.

“I gotta go to work,” she says in an equally quiet voice, even though her shift doesn’t start for another hour.

She leaves Terezi throwing up, and slams the door a little louder than a kinder person would.

It’s just—

There’s nothing she can do. Everything she tries to do is turned down and pushed away, Terezi curling ever smaller into her own world of pain and delirium and death.

 

 

Work is hard, but necessary, both for an escape and the cash. She assumes that Latula will cover the medical bills when she finds out, but until then Terezi’s copay is killing their savings account. Ms Paint, their landlady and wife to one of the Jack cousins, is so understanding it makes Vriska’s teeth ache. She is not something to be pitied, and neither is Terezi. If things had gone according to plan, Terezi would be head prosecutor of some bullshit place close to the Striders, and Vriska would be. . .

Well, okay, so she hasn’t figured out what she’d be doing. Ideally it would be running a bar like Snowman’s and knowing that the law would look the other way. Terezi’s blind spot was five foot four with long blonde hair, blue eyes, and a mean streak the size of Texas.

Having one blind spot wasn’t so bad for a blind woman.

“I don’t pay you to think about your dying lover,” Snowman says, not out loud, but with the way she leans against the counter and blows smoke through pursed lips into Vriska’s face. Vriska is short enough, and Snowman is tall enough—dear lord is that woman tall—that it doesn’t hit. Vriska grunts in annoyed acknowledgement anyways, and turns to give Crowbar the drink he’d forgotten he was asking for as soon as he caught sight of Snowman.

As shitty as her focus is, she takes a double shift, and the worst thing that happens is Snowman’s new way of getting her attention. She isn’t as bothered as she should be, mostly because every time she does try and take a smoke break she burns her fingers before she gets a decent drag, distracted out of her goddamn mind thinking of bills and vomit and tumors. She has to be getting nicotine into her system _somehow._

She goes home smelling of rum where she’d splashed some on her shirt, and feeling drunk with exhaustion even though she’s completely sober. Miraculously, she isn’t pulled over by the police for weaving side to side like a drunkard.

Falling into bed is a relief, a miracle, and sleep comes while she’s reaching up to take off her glasses.

 

 

“This scrapbook is a dumb idea,” Vriska says, dutifully handing Terezi the glue.

“Is this picture right side up?” Terezi asks, feeling it for a curve that could suggest which way is correct. Vriska would lie, just to make this less boring, but she doesn’t want a fight and Terezi always smells that shit anyway. Or maybe she senses it some other way—all Vriska knows is that she does this big inhale through her nose and says, _did a bull just shit in here,_ like that’s clever.

“Yeah,” she says, and kicks at the ground. Her shoe catches at the lip of the rug under the table and she worms it under there to worry at the hard wood underneath.

“Good.” Terezi places the picture in the center-ish of the page, where it is surrounded by brown and green scribbles that she insists are trees. Vriska thinks she’s had a very Picasso feel to her art attempts since she went blind.

“You can’t even see the fucking pictures, and it’s not like I’m gonna look at it,” Vriska insists.

“It’s for the children,” Terezi says primly, and Vriska snorts out a laugh, choking on the sound. After a second Terezi breaks her poker face to smile. She can never keep a neutral expression for very long.

“Just jump off my dick, okay?” she says, smoothing the photo down into the glue and holding it as flat as she can. “You look too good riding it for me to focus on making this masterpiece.”

“Aw, babe, you really know the way to a girl’s heart. Such smooth moves like that I’ve no idea how I was single so long before you.”

“You weren’t old enough to be single before me.”

“Thirteen _long,_ torturous years. I thought I would be a spinster, but neigh, riding to the resc—“

“Did you just say _neigh_ instead of nay?”

“You can’t prove that.” Vriska flushes, staring at the ceiling, her shameful slip pointed out almost immediately after it had been made.

“I’m calling a ban on Equius time for this week, that’s it.”

“I’ll stop talking to him when he stops being essential to passing my comp sci class.”

“How can I stand looking at myself in the mirror if my girlfriend talks like a brony?”

“How can you look in the mirror _now?”_

 

 

**CRASH.**

Vriska wakes with her heart in her throat, hand instinctively wrapping around the handle of the cutlass she keeps under the mattress. And look, now is really not the time to be questioning what she does with her tax returns, so you can shut the fuck up.

She pulls it in a fluid motion as she spins out of bed and towards the other side of the room where the noise had come from, pleased that all the mocked practice—and oh, how it had been mocked—paid off in the form of her not cutting herself with the cutlass, not even a little bit.

Terezi’s shape is kneeling in the closet, and there don’t seem to be any intruders, so Vriska shoves the sword back under the mattress and takes a step forward, and hits the switch that turns on the closet light.

Terezi’s groaning, the golden light of the hanging bulb turning her scarlet hair something softer, a scrapbook sitting by her side at an awkward angle that suggested it fell on her. It’s a theory corroborated both by the way Terezi is holding her shoulder and the sliding pile of books on the top shelf.

“The fuck are you doing,” Vriska says, advancing. She stubs her toe on something as she draws close and swears, glaring downwards.

Her blood runs cold, then hot, hot, hot, lava red with the intensity of her anger. It’s so much better than being afraid.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she hisses, grabbing Terezi’s shoulder and yanking her to a standing position.

Terezi starts crying, nothing more than an exhausted sniffle at this point of night. Her face is ashen, and she hasn’t slept right in days, waxy skin creasing into dark hollows under the cryolite glass eyes. She shakes her head mutely, a fine tremble in the hand she brings to grip at Vriska’s.

“Stop crying!” Vriska orders, because it’s disgusting, it’s _appalling,_ to see her partner look like this.

This is nothing like the girl she’d fallen in love with.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Terezi says, and Vriska takes an abrupt step back. Her hand slides out from underneath Terezi’s, or maybe _jerks_ is a better word. She doesn’t want to touch a Terezi who would say that to her.

“Do what?” she asks, voice coming out strained. She’s not sure what it’s strained with, but it’s having difficulty bearing the burden of volume, of existence, of coming out of her mouth and being heard, of soliciting an answer.

She’s thought of Terezi saying those words, and she’s never liked what she thought she might do if she heard them. Neither of their tempers are suited to a breakup, Terezi being far more forgiving than she should and Vriska possessive to the point where nothing Terezi did could drive her away.

“Do this to _you,”_ Terezi says, and Vriska lets out a harsh breath of relief. She can work with this.

 

 

The ride back home to Latula’s place is long, but they have to make it every summer for the fourth of July regardless. It’s the same with any other holiday that Vriska can’t find a way to weasel out of. Together the Pyropes pretend at being so functional and healthy that it makes her want to rip her hair out.

They stop at sunset on the side of a highway in some goddamn field that looks like every other field they’ve passed for the past three hours, or might indeed _be_ the same field. Terezi likes to smell the air while it goes crisp at dark, and Vriska likes to rest her eyes and stretch her legs, so it works out, whether they’re in Farmer Bumfuck Nowhere’s field, or Farmer Where Is Everyone’s field.

Her sleeves have been down all day, and the unpleasant heat after the air conditioned car makes her itch to roll them up. She glances over at Terezi, at the way her eyes are closed and her ass is planted on the bed of Vriska’s red truck, and figures she might as well do it now.

“Check this out,” she says, smugness radiating from her voice already. This was the best birthday gift she’d ever gotten someone, even if Terezi’s birthday technically wasn’t for another several months, and Vriska had only gotten it because Terezi had exams and she was ninety percent of Vriska’s impulse control.

Terezi squinted at her, and her teal eyes glinted just a bit too shiny in the dying light of the sun to be convincingly flesh, no matter how well painted. Or whatever the fuck real eyes were made out of, anyways. Plasma? Shit, no that was blood.

Vriska shook off the thoughts and grabbed Terezi’s hand and put it on the back of her forearm. Terezi gave a sharp inhale at the feel of the gel beads pressing up from underneath Vriska’s skin.

“Is this. . . a LARPing in joke?” Terezi asked, starting to snicker disbelievingly. “You got a braille tattoo so you could say that time equals dead children.”

“Damn straight I did.” Vriska winked, because Terezi had a gift for picking up on that sort of thing even with no eyes to see it.

Terezi laughed until she damn near cried, and Vriska’s smugness lasted all the way up until she got into a road rage incident with a cow who wouldn’t fucking move from the road.

 

 

“You’re not doing anything to me,” Vriska says, because it’s always best to go with the self effacing thing when you’re not sure what’s happening and your fiancé was packing a suitcase in the middle of the night.

“This is unbearably hard for _me,”_ Terezi says. “And I don’t even like myself right now!”

“Well, I don’t much either,” Vriska snaps, because self effacing is really not her strong suit, “Not when you’re making decisions about our relationship without talking to me and sniveling like a child.”

“How am I supposed to make decisions with you when you can’t even stand being in the same room as me?” Terezi snaps back. Her face is reddening in splotches, like she can’t get enough blood in her pale face at once to create an even blush. “I’m fucking dying, and I’m doing it _alone.”_

Vriska hissed through her teeth. “And it’s my choice, is it, to make you not call your mom, or Rose, or Dave, or Sollux?”

Terezi laughs, bitterly. Vriska can taste it, and it’s acrid in her mouth. “You know I—“

 

 

At four years old, Terezi punched an Ampora in the crotch. There were extenuating circumstances, such as what that crotch was doing so close to her punching hand, and the adults were the ones who cared about those.

Vriska cared far more about her being the best puncher she’d ever seen, and the first puncher to punch someone _for_ Vriska.

She knew she was going to keep her, the second Terezi pulled back her clenched fist and clutched the knuckles where they’d been torn by Cronus’ zipper.

 

 

Terezi Pyrope dies very early on a Thursday morning, anticlimactically, in the middle of a sentence that Vriska likes to pretend ended with “love you” but probably ended with “can’t do that”. Latula thinks that she died in her sleep of an aneurysm.

Since the aneurysm robbed her of consciousness as her brain starved to death from lack of oxygen, Vriska supposes that is technically true, and feels no need to correct her.

“Feels. . . like a bad ending to a book,” she says to the eldest of the Jack cousins, the one married to or fucking or dating or whatever-ing Ms Paint.

He just stares at her, and plays with a switchblade.

“Not like, oh no, that book was sad, more like. . .” Vriska pauses, makes a face at the shot of vodka by her hand and then downs it anyways. “More like a book that someone just wanted _done_ with. They had other things they wanted to do. Take a shower. Fuck their wife. Work on a video game adaptation that they said would be released in January but now it’s March and your fiancé is dead but there’s _still no video game_.”

Jack raised a single eyebrow, by which she meant the flesh above his right eye kind of quirked upwards. He was the Jack cousin with no eyebrows. Waxed them, Vriska always thought.

“Look, I can be upset about Midnight Crew and the amount of money I dumped into their kickstarter as long as I goddamn want and you all can stop giving me a hard time about it. Do I comment on how dumb your face looks with absolutely no hair, even in your nostrils, which I know because you’re a thousand feet tall and I’m a reasonable height? No? I don’t? Well then _shut up.”_

She takes another shot. She doesn’t know the new bartender, just that she’s bubbly with a sharp edge that makes Vriska want to throw up looking at her. Whether it’s disgust at someone rolling herself in puns like it’s the last blanket on Earth and she lives in Antarctica, or the fact that she’s one hundred percent Vriska’s type—

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t really care to find out.

“I just. . . I wanted it to be over so much, you know? I just didn’t realize what it would be like when it was done. I didn’t. . .

“I wasn’t ready, Jack.”

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings: major character death, terminal illness, Vriska is literally a psychopath, rape and molestation mentions all over the place, alcohol mentions, minor domestic violence, bullying mentions. Probably some other shit I'm forgetting, if I forgot something let me know and I'll put it in here.
> 
> on tumblr at [this gorgeous blog ;)](ang3lba3.tumblr.com)


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